Thursday, February 21. 2008

On Super Tuesday, I voted for Barack Obama. The decision to support the Illinois senator for president came about only after a long and somewhat difficult process of elimination.

To begin with the Republican field, it is clear that none of the Republicans have even a plausible claim to being LGBT-supportive and none deserve serious consideration by members of the LGBT community. Any of the Democrats would be significantly better on our issues than John McCain or Mike Huckabee, not to mention an improvement over the homophobic and disastrous presidency of George W. Bush; but it would be an unacceptably low standard indeed for a candidate simply to be an improvement over the worst president in the history of the United States.

As for the Democrats, the most LGBT-supportive candidate in the field was Dennis Kucinich, who supported same-sex marriage and full transgender inclusion in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act (LLEEA) (the federal hate crimes bill); but he dropped out after New Hampshire, having won not a single delegate. John Edwards, who spoke passionately about poverty and class issues, dropped out after a dismal third-place finish in South Carolina, the state of his birth. And the others — Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and Mike Gravel — barely registered on the radar screen. That has left Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama to battle it out for the nomination.

To her credit, Hillary Clinton has a command of the details of policy that matches or surpasses that of any of the candidates, Democratic or Republican. She is clearly a skilled politician and — as she herself never tires of reminding us — has executive experience in her husband’s White House as well as legislative experience in the Senate.

But the argument that one should automatically vote for the more experienced candidate is one that would have favored Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy in 1960, George H.W. Bush over Bill Clinton in 1992 and Ronald Reagan over Walter Mondale in 1984, not to mention George W. Bush over John Kerry in 2004. As Obama himself has noted, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld brought decades of experience into the Bush administration in 2000, and the latter became the first secretary of defense ever to have come into office with previous experience in that same position; we can see the unfortunate results of the application of that experience in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

Furthermore, the one incontrovertible instance of executive experience that Hillary Clinton can claim was leading the administration’s health care reform initiative, with disastrous results. As even the most cursory review of the history of the Bush presidency will show, experience is worthless without the good judgment to utilize that experience productively and effectively. And on the central issue facing the country in 2003, Barack Obama had the good judgment to see that the invasion of Iraq could have potentially catastrophic consequences, while Hillary Clinton demonstrated the quality of her judgment in supporting the Bush administration’s ill-advised rush to war.

And so experience alone simply is not a persuasive argument when one examines the historical record. Neither is “having the experience to bring about change,” given the absence of a clear commitment on Hillary Clinton’s part to progressive and transformational change.

There is yet another compelling argument against Hillary’s experience mantra, as I see it, and that is the pattern of dynastic condominium that her election as president would cement. Even the most enthusiastic supporter of another Clinton presidency should consider the deleterious effect on American democracy of the regular alternance of Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton. Were Hillary to be elected to two consecutive terms, the United States would have been under 28 years of unbroken rule by the Bush/Clinton dynasties — more than an entire generation — and that kind of dynastic politics is one that any progressive must reject as elitist and profoundly undemocratic.

Even putting that issue aside, the record of the Clinton administration was a distinctly mixed one. While there were a few successes (such as the federal budget surplus) — none of which can be attributed to the First Lady’s direction — Bill Clinton’s was a mediocre presidency at best, eight largely wasted years of indirection and lowest-common-denominator politics. And as is evident with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its implementation, Clinton administration economic policies were based on a misguided neo-liberal free trade dogma and oriented to serving the needs of the big corporate interests that have funded the Clintons for over three decades, from Perdue to Wal-Mart (on whose board of directors Hillary sat and from whom she has taken campaign contributions). Indeed, it was the explicit aim of the Clintons to use the Democratic Leadership Council to shift the party to the center, at the expense of the progressive values that are, in my view, its only raison d’etre. But for me, the most disturbing episode in the Clinton presidency was the administration’s willful refusal to intervene to prevent what they knew was a genocide in Rwanda, at the cost of nearly a million lives.